Through the years, many different characters have gone by the nickname, “The Great One.” The first, at least in recent years, was probably the actor and performer Jackie Gleason. He was given the nickname by the legendary director Orson Welles; supposedly, it had more to do with Gleason’s prodigious talent for drinking than his performing, but it still stuck.

Sometime in the late 1960s, Pittsburgh baseball fans began to call Roberto Clemente, “The Great One.” It was more than a nickname, it was a title of royalty for a player who was so impossibly graceful and wonderful that people simply reached for the highest honorific they could find. It is a bit like the way Alaska locals called the highest mountain peak in North America, “Denali,” which (by some translations) means “The High One” or “The Great One.”

(The mountain peak has actually had many names, most famously “Mount McKinley” after then-candidate and future U.S. President William...